One morning in your bathroom, brushing your teeth as you ready for work, you suddenly stop, mid-brush, and ask yourself: “I wonder where I could get a tuxedo for a horse?”

This might seem like an implausible scenario, even if you own a horse. And yet someone at the Kentucky Humane Society faced this very real question before last weekend’s annual Tuxes & Tails Benefit Gala fundraiser, where the theme was Hollywoof and the Cats’ Meow. “The highlight of this event,” the society-newsweekly Voice-Tribune reports this week, “is always the special furry guests who mingle with the crowd during cocktail hour.”

And yet Boulevard thinks the highlight was, in fact, a mini-horse named Abner, who posed with guests outside — in his tuxedo. It’s our party pic of the week. (View the photo gallery.)

Given his stature (height, not social), we wonder: Was he named after Li’l Abner Yokum, the main character of the long-running comic strip about a fictional clan of hillbillies living in dirt-poor Dogpatch, Ky.?

— Voice-Tribune correspondent Carla Sue Broecker in her “Partyline” social column in today’s issue. She’s describing an enormous Victorian house with 12-foot ceilings in Bardstown. Kentucky was a border state during the Civil War. Otherwise, Hammond’s luncheons might have been for the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

We ask after noticing this week’s 10 parties include The Vein Treatment & Aesthetic Center’s annual summer open house on June 29. “The well-attended event,” we learn, “featured exciting prize drawings as well as discounted pricing on an assorted array of Vein Treatment & Aesthetic Center products. Various reps were also there to answer any questions attendees may have, and all enjoyed plenty of wine and light hors d’oeuvres.”

With all due respect, as people say when they actually mean the opposite, Boulevard wonders whether that event really qualifies as the crème de la crème of Louisville’s social scene. Yet, props to the 16-year-old clinic for silk-purse marketing its vericose and spider vein treatments.

The center, according to its website, “coddles patients with a smorgasbord of cosmetic services in a cozy skin-clarifying facility. During your microdermabrasion, a skin savant will gently sweep perished skin cells under the closest rug, then set an antioxidant-rich ultrasonic infusion to the task of moisturizing arid flesh and rejuvenating the body’s roughened husk.”

To be sure, we’re a wee taken aback by the juxtaposition of “smorgasbord,” “perished skin cells,” and the “light hors d’oeuvres” served at the clinic’s open house. But that’s why we’re not in public relations.

Now, to our party pics pick!

Hands down, it was the June 30 celebration at home furnishings store Dwellings for its new location at 139 Breckenridge Lane. Of Tim Valentino‘s 32 pics, guests Palmer Cole and Tyler Freeman in photo No. 19 were the week’s best.

No grand opening would be complete without a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and Dwellings and the St. Mathews Chamber of Commerce didn’t disappoint — leading to our last mystery of the cosmos:

Where do all the chambers get those giant ceremonial scissors to cut ribbons? Turns out, there’s an actual company, Golden Openings of Urbandale, Iowa, that sells them — along with golden shovels for groundbreakings, plus all the other accoutrements of commercial ceremonies. Their biggest working scissors are 40 inches long and sell for $199.

Golden Openings even sells a 17-page book for $19 that “guides you through the ribbon cutting from start to finish. This book provides a detailed description of the items you’ll need to consider to have a first class ribbon cutting!”

With NFocus Louisville’s sudden demise, Boulevard is more dependent than ever on The Voice-Tribune for our window on the ladies who lunch and the men who punch.

Cogan

Tangoing straight to the chase, here’s today’s party pics pick: Let’s Dance Louisville, where Cathedral of the Assumption hosted a “Dancing with the Stars”-esque fundraiser last Saturday, featuring local “celebrities” (to use the editor’s choice of punctuation).

More than 400 guests turned out — including two of the most attractive people to grace a Voice-Tribune photo gallery in, oh, forever: Amy Munno and actor Adam Raque, who each possess bazillion-watt smiles. Flip through the 26 pics, then put on your Jackie O. shades before you hit No. 24. In the meantime, here’s Raque on Instagram:

[Insert exhausted sigh here.] Nearly three weeks later, we may have finally reached the apotheosis of this year’s horsey soirée news here: “More than 167,000 eager spectators enjoyed beautiful weather at Churchill Downs on May 7 for the 142nd running of the Kentucky Derby,” the Voice-Tribune says. “The mint juleps flowed as excitement built toward the call to post, and the most exciting two minutes in sports saw Nyquist triumph over his 19 competitors.”

Our Publisher

Jim Hopkins wrote the award-winning Gannett Blog, and was an editor and reporter for newspapers across the country over two decades, including The Courier-Journal in Louisville, where he was an investigative reporter in 1996-2000. Learn more about him here.

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